A group of six academics have published a paper describing a new high speed anonymity network that could increase the privacy of internet users everywhere.
According to the Daily Dot, the network is called HORNET: High-speed Onion Routing at the Network Layer, and aims to provide Tor-style privacy along with higher routing speeds.
ItPro reports that: “Although it works in a similar fashion to Tor, the researchers said it is much faster because the number of users can be limited, lightening the capacity load and therefore ensuring it can be transferred much faster than the more traditional methods.
“This in turn will mean it is less likely to be hacked because anyone wishing to intercept data wouldn’t have enough time to siphon off the data or work out a hack before it is encrypted again using another server,” explained ItPro.
Although broadly regarded as secure, Tor often suffers from slow data speeds, but the proposed HORNET nodes can process anonymous traffic at over 93Gb/s, according to the researchers.
However, as the Daily Dot’s Patrick O'Neill pointed out, none of the research has been checked yet, so drawing conclusions about the viability of the project is impossible: "Peer review is critical to the development of research like this, and Hornet can't be considered even close to fully formed until review comes.
"Still, research that endeavours to rethink the design of anonymity networks can lay the groundwork for the next stages of the technology."
